Frequently remembered as the legendary Irish patriot who rallied his people against Robert Walpole's corrupt English regime, Swift cut his teeth as a political writer - no other phrase seems appropriate - in the service of English administrations. Defending the nation against self-interested coffee-house factions, he proved a thoroughly partisan enemy of party and faction. Asserting that he understood neither party labels nor the passions they aroused, he represented himself as a judicious independent while allying himself first with the Whigs and then with the Tories. A brilliant polemicist, he crafted for general readers deeply interested in politics a body of writing that now tests the scholarly mettle of specialists in remote partisan squabbles. No wonder Swift mordantly satirizes political writers in his great narrative satires. A Tale of a Tub savages hacks who write for rival factions, as he would soon do. Gulliver's Travels opens when Lemuel Gulliver is thirty-eight, just a little older than the Swift who published A Tale of a Tub to impress potential Whig patrons and only a little younger than the Swift who began editing the Tory Examiner in 1710. In Gulliver's perpetual surprise that self-serving pettiness dominates court politics, Swift surely recalls his own political naiveté. Since Gulliver too wants to eliminate party and faction, Swift as surely recollects his own vanity of authorship when Gulliver complains that “after above six Months Warning, I cannot learn that my Book hath produced one single Effect according to mine Intentions” (PW xi: 6).